Toshiba demos first ever HD DVD RW notebook

Posted on 8 Jan 2008 at 08:51

Toshiba's Qosmio notebooks concentrate on multimedia features, with TV tuners, large displays and excellent speakers. The Qosmio G30-163 was the first notebook we saw with a HD DVD drive, and so it's little surprise to first see a HD DVD RW drive fitted in the Qosmio G45-AV690.

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The drive will write to HD DVD R and HD DVD RW discs, as well as all the usual DVD media. This means you can make multiple backups of up to 15GB by overwriting old data on a single disc. We couldn't find any HD DVD RW media available for sale however.

In other respects it's very impressive, with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 3GB RAM, and two 160GB hard disks. It has a 1900x1200 resolution display too, so you can appreciate every detail of your HD DVD movies. Alternatively the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics chipset can output a full 1080p signal from the notebook's HDMI port.

We saw the a US version of the notebook at CES in Las Vegas, so the TV tuner was an external model for cable services. European Qosmio's have always included built-in DVB-T tuners instead, and we can't see any reason why a European version of this model would be any different.

A more pertinent question is whether, given recent events, Toshiba will launch this notebook in Europe at all. Toshiba representatives at CES couldn't confirm such a release at this time.

Author: Seth Barton in Las Vegas

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